


Teenage Rebellion Accidentally Stops the End of the World

by Whooly_Shep



Series: Reginald Hargreeves works hard, teenage hormones work harder [1]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Butterfly affect, Character Growth, Eudora and Vanya are gonna be friends because why not, Everybody Lives, F/F, F/M, Friendship, Gen, M/M, Mental Health Issues, No Incest, Sibling Bonding, Underage Drinking, cause she parties sometimes, later adult vanya, teen!Vanya, the adjustement bureau has a big storm coming
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-25
Updated: 2019-11-28
Packaged: 2019-12-07 03:30:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 21,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18229301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whooly_Shep/pseuds/Whooly_Shep
Summary: Puberty’s a hard time for everybody. Especially when you discover your secret superpowers that were suppressed for years, along with any strong emotion you could’ve had. Is it any surprise that teenage rebellion would ensue? Probably not.Or Vanya forgets to take her pills one day and teenage hormones make her realize she has powers. Teenage rebellion ensues and she somehow stops the end of the world just by being herself. Also includes personal growth and underage drinking.Inspired by the song Townie by Mistki.





	1. Chapter 1

Vanya was always just a sort of presence that hovered in the background of people’s lives. She was there but most of the time nobody noticed her. Not her siblings, not Pogo and certainly not her “father”. She hated that she was less than an afterthought. Of course she didn’t know yet that it would be a blessing in disguise. After all, no one ever suspects the quiet ones.

There are many places where this story could begin. We could start it when Vanya was born like all the other forty three children around the world. We could also start with when she got her powers “taken away” and was essentially made “normal”. But we won’t. 

Instead, we’ll start the story a few months after the umbrella academy revealed itself to the world by stopping a bank heist. Vanya was, like all her siblings, thirteen at the time and going through what would probably be the worst and best period of her life, puberty.

It was a cold January afternoon and she’d forgotten to take her pill that morning. She’d been unfocused all through out the day and had only figured out after lunch that it was because she hadn’t had her pill. Of course it was too late now to go tell Sir Reginald without getting punished for it. So she decided to spend the rest of the day without her medication.

Everything went almost as smoothly as always. Her and five talked a bit between training during the few breaks they had. She helped mom make cookies, she practiced her violin and read a book. Everything went smoothly, at least until bedtime came.

She was walking back to her room lost in thought with her violin in hand when she heard what sounded like fighting from one of the rooms. She barely had time to react as something no someone was thrown through the air, directly crashing into her.

She tumbles to the ground and hears a crunch underneath her as she herself is crushed under the weight someone. She realizes it’s number two crashed into her. A second later her gets up to yell something.

“One you ass, what was that for?” he screams without stuttering to the open bedroom door he was thrown out of. It’s only after he turns around to inspect the damage from his short flight that he even notices he crashed into somebody.

“S-sorry about your violin seven.” He says looking at something next to her.

“What?” She asks before following his gaze to see her violin laying next to her on the ground, broken.

In that moment she feels something she’s not sure she’s ever felt quite so clearly before. In truth it might be the first thing she’s truly felt in well, all of her life. It’s hot and burning and thrashing and ugly and everything she’s never let herself be. Maybe she couldn’t be, until now.

“Why” she says slowly.  
“Why the HELL did you do that?” She screams at two who recoils, obviously surprised to see his meek sister suddenly big and loud.

“It it wasn’t m-my fault. Plus it’s just a stupid v-violin, who cares?” He says.

“A stupid violin? That stupid violin is the only thing that matters to me and you just broke it.” she says getting up and pushing two back. She picks up the pieces of her violin and her bow and stomps to her room.

Once she gets to her room she throws what’s left of her instrument onto the floor. It stays there, discarded and useless, just like her. She angry. Angry that she can’t have literally any other family, angry that she can’t just be special, but most of all angry that she can’t play her violin. That the only thing that brought her solace between her brother’s taunts and her father’s harsh words and even harsher punishments is gone.

She wants to scream. So she does.

It’s not earsplitting like an opera singer but still the sound of it weirdly resonates within her entire being. Then it happens, a glass of water she’d brought into her room earlier that day explodes. That makes her stop screaming.

Then she’s just staring at the broken glass before she realizes that,she,did,that. The consequential realization that she just blew up a glass of water with what was probably her mind is enough to send her into a panicked frenzy.

Everything’s too much and she just needs to get out of her room, but she can’t just go somewhere else in the house. Reginald has cameras all over the house, although he doesn’t have one in her room because she’s not “important” enough. The next logical leap for number seven is that she should jump out of her window.

It’s all a blur as she cleans up the broken glass while trying not to get cut. Then takes some of her uniforms puts them under the covers of her bed so it looks like it’s her. When she’s done, she closes her bedroom lights, opens her window and climbs down to the alleyway next to the academy. She then goes out onto the street and starts running like her life depends on it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, I should have the next chapter up in the next week so stick around for that.  
> My tumblr https://whooly-shep.tumblr.com
> 
> Bonus information I briefly considered naming this fic “Reginald Hargreeves works hard, teenage hormones work harder”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vanya runs and has some time to think.

It’s a while before she really calms down enough to stop and ask herself where the hell she is. 

She’s on a dark street with only a few streetlights. There’s nobody around this time of night and a sort of soft quiet blankets everything. She’s never been to this part of town before but then again she hasn’t been to a lot of places. Reginald didn’t let her much out of the academy. Sometimes he would let her come on missions but those exceptions were few and far between.

Sometimes her siblings would sneak out at night, most of the time they wouldn’t invite her or even let her know they were going out. Sometimes they would and sometimes it would just be five taking her out. He was probably the nicest to her out of all of her siblings. She’d probably only tell him about her... what her powers?

It didn’t make sense to her that they’d only come out today. All her other other siblings had had their powers since they were born so why would she be any different? If she was like the others then she should’ve been able to blow stuff up or something since she was a child. So why hadn’t she been able to until today?

She tried to think of anything that she’d done differently. It didn't take her long to figure out, then again she hadn’t figured it out for her whole life so maybe she was late at answering a guessing game she didn’t even know she was playing.

The pills, the ones that her “father” had been giving her since she was a child, the pills that were supposed to help her with her “nerves”. They had taken away her powers. Maybe not just her powers. Now that she thought about it she hadn’t felt well anything quite like all the feelings she’d been having all day. All of them as confusing as those equations five sometimes tried to explain to her. Maybe that was why she couldn’t use her powers until today, because if she didn’t have any strong emotions then she didn’t have them.

She wanted to scream again but for the sake of figuring things out she decided to wait until the next time she would be in front of he “dad” to scream. Possibly very loudly at him, with insults thrown in there too because why not. Number four probably knew some so she could ask him to teach her.

She didn’t realize it until now but she’d been standing next to a bakery doing nothing for a while. Even though she probably should be stressed about being in the city alone at night with no one else. But she didn’t feel an ounce of anxiety. Probably because at home was worse than alone at night.

She liked it, the calm. There was nobody around and if there was somebody, they wouldn’t know her. They wouldn’t act like she was less than them or recognize her as a Hargreeves (thanks to her sham of a “father” not putting her in the spotlight). They’d simply walk past her without a care about who she is. Maybe for some people they’d feel hurt by that for some reason, but for number seven it would in fact be the best thing in the world. She could be herself and not have to deal with people.

She was special now and wether she wanted to or not, she couldn’t let anybody find out because if they did then maybe her dad would, somehow, and then maybe he’d find a way to take away her powers for good. She wouldn’t let him.

She was sick of her entire life being about the academy, about how she couldn’t mesure up to her other siblings or how she didn’t have a power, which mind you wasn’t even true. But she didn’t know how to even begin building herself a life outside of the umbrella. How could she bee something different than what she was right now when she didn’t even know what whatever she wanted to be looked like.

With all those thoughts swirling around her head she decides to head back home. She briefly thinks about running away but knowing her “dad” he’d probably figure out that she discovered her powers. She didn’t want her siblings coming after her because Reginald ordered them to do so. She might hate them sometimes but she still loved them, as much as someone can love when they almost don’t have emotions.

It takes her no time to get back to alley she climbed out of. For some reason she remembers five quoting the phrase time passes fast when you’re having fun and, belatedly, realizes she really had been having fun. Possibly more fun than she’d had in a very long time. By simply just taking a walk she’d had more enjoyment than any time she’d played the violin or read a book or baked cookies with her mom.

As she’s climbing through the window to her bedroom, she thinks that maybe she’ll do it again soon. Who knows what the world is really like outside? She could do anything and nobody would know. Maybe she could even make actual real life friends. The possibilities were endless.

She quickly changes into her pyjamas and goes to bed. She knows it’s late but she can’t help staying up under the covers thinking of everything she would do the next time she sneaked out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, as always check out my tumblr if you want at https://whooly-shep.tumblr.com
> 
> Also should I change the fic’s name? I mean I already have a tag for teenage rebellion accidentally saves the world on my tumblr but I could probably change things. Some of you have said the og title “Reginald Hargreeves works hard, teenage hormones work harder” would be better. Let me know in the comments what you think.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vanya has breakfast and someone spills the beans

It’s the morning after her “Grand Escape” and Vanya feels like hell warmed over for four minutes in a microwave. Frozen yet somehow also burnt and definitively wrong. Everything feels wrong wrong wrong. Yet right. The telltale sound of the wake up alarm blaring does nothing to help her feel better.

She remembers reading about the effects of drug withdrawal once in a scientific journal that was laying around the library. It had said something about having anxiety for certain drugs, flu-like symptoms and even seizures. Thanks for that Reginald.

Seven didn’t know what her “father” had been giving her so she mentally prepared herself for the worst and assumed that all of those symptoms would eventually happen to her. She’d go check out that book again later. For now she needed to get dressed because she’s never late to breakfast and even though there’s a first time for everything she’s feeling too paranoid right now to risk breaking routine and putting a metaphorical red flag on herself.

She gets dressed in her usual uniform and starts heading towards the dining room. She tries to get there as fast as possible to get breakfast over with as soon as possible. Of course, with her luck, she doesn’t make it three steps down the stairs that number two calls out her. Great.

“Hey seven, can we talk.” He says without stuttering which probably means he practiced whatever speech he’s about to give her... at seven in the morning. She questions herself in her head if not running away really was the best option.

“Sure but make it quick I don’t want ‘dad’ to be mad cause we’re late to breakfast.”

“Ok yeah, I just, I just wanted to apologize about what happened with your Violin.” He says like that’s an actual apology. But she relents, with two this was basically equivalent to begin on your knees for forgiveness.

“It’s okay, I won’t tell Reginald.” She says because, even though she wouldn’t in the first place since the sibling who broke it would get severely punished, she doesn’t have the time to deal with it. She feels like she’s on a tight schedule for some reason. Like if she’s not early to everything and in control, things will somehow turn against her. Maybe this is her supposed “nerves” showing. 

She gets to the dining room and sits down at her usual seat. She makes sure to make herself seem as meek and invisible like usual. That shouldn’t be too hard anyway. Her dad had made sure to exclude her out of most of the activities her siblings did. She wasn’t allowed to train with them or even bee near them while they were doing so. 

He’d made sure to sow seeds of superiority in their heads to make sure they would be more prone to exclude her. Little comments here and there that she’d heard all leading to one logical conclusion, Reginald Hargreeves was a bitch. Correction, is a bitch. She’d never had the courage to even think it but now that she didn’t have the emotional capacities of a spoon she felt (she could feel!!) that Reginald not only did not deserve the respect of not being called a bitch, he also did not deserve not to be punched in the face. 

These thoughts made it very hard for her to suppress any reaction when her sad excuse of a father walked in like he owned the place, which technically he did but that wasn’t the point. The point she was trying to make was that he’s an asshole and right now she needs to not see him. She didn’t want a repeat of the previous night with random objects exploding. She wasn’t sure what her powers were exactly but she knew enough from the brief usage to know how bad they could get.

In a split second decision she decides to pick up the pill mom had placed in front of her and swallows it. She feels nauseous as the pill goes down her throat.

She looks around to see if anybody noticed her odd actions and surprisingly it’s not one of the higher numbers, who usually pay attention, to her but instead Luther. He’s watching her with a confused frown on his face. Had he been looking at her for long? She hadn’t checked to see if he watching her. She hadn’t thought she’d needed to, they never talked so he had no logical reason to be watching her. Then again, nowadays things were getting less logical.

As her “dad” walks over to the gramophone to play one of his boring lectures she feels herself calm down. Then become too calm. Her emotions are mostly gone again. Even in her somewhat emotionless drug induced state she knows that she wants to do what she did last night again.

It’s no secret to her that she won’t be able to do it the next night or the one after that or maybe not this week or even this month. But she would, without a doubt, break out again. She would go without her pills for a day. She would climb out of her bedroom window and most importantly she would be free. Maybe she could go make friends. It’s hard to find people your age just out on the streets when it was way past your bedtime so she’d probably have to settle with being friends with adults. That didn’t matter to her, as long as it would be something.

She would have to look up how to make friends in the library’s books. Maybe she could try to emulate how people talked to each other in the books or make similar situations to novels happen. She couldn’t exactly make friends with a prostitute in an 18th century brothel in Paris but she figured a waitress in a coffeehouse could be a good enough substitute. Walking back home she had seen a few shops, even a bakery. Maybe when she was older she could work there and save enough money to get away from the house, maybe go on a trip.

With all these thoughts swimming around her head Vanya barely realized that everyone including herself had finished breakfast. As everyone except her headed off to training, she was heading off to the library for her own “independent studies”. With a bounce in her step she decided today was going to be a good day.

She didn’t know it yet but her actions, although very simple on their own meant a lot than she would have thought. Like a single file of dominos, her actions while seemingly straightforward in their goals would affect many things. The single domino file would expand into two rows of dominos and then three and then four until thing would change so much that you could barely tell it had only taken one domino accidentally tipped over to change the whole world.

Meanwhile in an office in the temps commission an office worker is looking over their reports. Their coffee is as bitter as their attitude but at least both help them get through the day. The office worker raises an eyebrow at the 2003 May New York City readings. Something is off with them. 

The employee is of course use to seeing such readings. In their time they’ve read over thousands of files. Most of the time it was just one of their other field employees that had accidentally caused some slight detail in the works to be changed. A flower stepped on, a gun misplaced, a body left out in the open. These things happened, even to the best of the best. It actually was usually the best of the best as no one else sane enough would go take the missions that let so many bodies behind.

Just as the worker leans over to look over the data their cup accidentally tips and spill hot coffee all over the papers and the worker. Said worker of course curses before heading off to the bathroom to go clean up their work clothes.

When they return to their desk the documents have been thoroughly soaked and steeped in now cold coffee. The employee is not too happy of this result and decides to simply throw the whole file into their garbage can. They can go ask for a copy, even thought it will probably be pretty humiliating to admit to spilling coffee all over their files.

Just as they’re about to head to the print out people the office bell rings to indicate that it’s lunch time. Not wanting to face the shame of their actions right at that instant the worker decides to put off the humiliation to after lunch. Not wanting to think about it they go meet their other worker friends in the lunch room.

By the time they get back they forget that they needed to go get copies of the report and simply write off the feeling of needing to do something as unimportant. After all, if the thing they need to do was so important they wouldn’t need to remember to do it.

With this another row of dominos begins to fall. Had the office worker not forgotten the copies or spilled their coffee this story probably would’ve gone differently. Maybe Vanya’s nighttime adventures and stories would have been cut short, maybe there would have been a huge confrontation between the commission and the academy or maybe at the very least they would’ve sent someone to go investigate. 

But by circumstances none of these things would happen. Instead the story would go unperturbed for longer until things were too changed to even have a specific point in time to point out where it happened, how it happened and why it happened. Sometimes little things like hope could go unnoticed for a long time but if left alone to grow long enough, they could make a world of a difference. And since no one would think to pay attention to Vanya for a little while longer, that hope would grow and grow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey hope you guys enjoyed this new chapter, I’m thinking of being more proactive and responding more to comments. I have the week off so I might even get the next chapter out early.
> 
> If you notice mistakes please tell me in the comments and I’ll fix them. Follow me @whooly-shep on tumblr if you want  
> Again thanks for reading


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vanya snaps and makes a new friend.

It’s a while before Vanya decides that enough time has passed for her to stage her next “big escape”. A month two weeks and four days to be exact. Vanya has made sure to be as normal and boring as possible in that timespan. Maybe before she would have vied for her sibling’s attention but now she didn’t seek any of them out. If they wanted to talk to her they would just have to come up to her by themselves.

They didn’t, well mostly. Five still wanted to be around her and she decided he’d be one of the few exceptions she could allow and that she would seek him out. The other exceptions she made was asking her siblings for money in exchange for favours. Since her “dad” didn’t give them a weekly allowance or any money at all the only time her siblings would get money was when they were out on a mission and they either found it on the ground or had it thrown at them by someone they’d just saved. Either way she didn’t go out of used to anyway so she couldn’t get money any other way meaning she had to suck up to her siblings and hope for the best.

Vanya has a plan. It’s not much but it’s a plan. With the money she’s saved up she’s going to visit those coffee shops and that bakery she saw during her “breakout”. She doesn’t want to get kicked out for not buying anything which is why she had to save money. She’s going to try to talk with the people there and maybe make a friend.

Day in and day out she’d been reading up everything she could on friendship in the library. Her search had lead her to guess that what was in the books was probably unattainable and so she’d have to wing it. Sometimes after she came down from her research for dinner she would see Luther eyeing her warily. She wasn’t certain what she’d done to warrant such a look but she herself became wary of him. She had to wonder why he had started paying attention to her now of all the other times he could have. Had he seen her escape? Use her power? She didn’t know and now that she was off her medication she could feel the anxiety flooding back.

That night at the dinner table she had to try very hard not to shake her leg or let any other ticks show. As usual nobody looked at her and she looked at everybody to make sure they weren’t looking at her funny. Nobody was looking at her except Luther who, when she caught him starring, quickly looked down to his chicken soup that had apparently become the most interesting thing in the world.

The dishwasher thrummed in perfect harmony with the refrigerator one room over in the kitchen. The sound of spoons clicking on ceramic bowls is almost drowned out by the monotonous tone of a man coming from the gramophone. Somehow she could distantly hear the sound of cars honking a few streets away. 

She was sick of the noise. Sick not of the fact that there was too much but that there wasn’t enough. That a family half a block away could have an animated conversation with laughter and raised voices devoid of anger. That down the street two parents were talking with a warmth she’d never even dared imagine to their child. That while out there in the summer heat people matched the warmth of the season while inside, in her house, in this dinning room the only thing she feel is a cold similar to winter. That they can’t laugh or talk or even whisper at the table without getting punished. That her father probably doesn’t care about her or either of her siblings like all those parents she could now hear did.

She angry again. She hasn’t felt like that since her last incident, this probably isn’t a good thing but she can’t bring herself to care about not caring. Vanya thought that she just wanted to get out of the house before, now she knows that she needs to get out of the house right this instant. But she can’t. She could scream at her father and he wouldn’t even care. She could end the world and he would barely give her a passing glance. She’s angry and she wants to smash something.

She decides fuck it and does just that.

With a yell ripping itself out of her throat and a vice grip on her empty ceramic she raises it above her head. Then she throws it all her might at the ground. It smashes into a million tiny pieces just like the previous silence. For a moment everyone, even Reginald, is frozen. Meek shy normal Vanya just did something that none of her other siblings would have even thought to do. Without using any powers she’d broken the silence imposed by their father. Now there was a new kind of silence hanging in the air. It wasn’t one of fear and compliance like before. It was one of anticipation. All of her siblings waiting to see how their father would react.

For a moment Reginald Hargreeves, millionaire extraordinaire, philanthropist and renowned scientist, child abuser and manipulator, looked at a loss for words. Then his expression changes into something vicious and slightly angry. He’s got that look in his eye he gets when he’s about to ask a rhetorical question like “WhAt iS tHe meNInG of thIS?”  
As predicted he does indeed ask Vanya “What is the meaning of this?”

Vanya, ever the most socially apt person simply answers “I was annoyed at something so I threw that bowl on the ground.”

Reginald once again looks at her for a moment. Only this time he looks at her like how he looks at her siblings when they’re doing their training and someone makes a mistake. He’s looking at her like he does when he’s reading a situation report before heading off with her siblings leaving her behind.

He’s looking at her like she’s a possible threat and right now for all intents and purposes, if Vanya isn’t careful, she’ll become one.

He simply asks her after a moment of silence “Have you taken your medication today?”

To all her other siblings this probably just seems like a normal question to ask. If she’s off her anxiety pills then maybe she’s just had a bad reaction or something. That’s probably where they think this whole line of questioning and her surprising actions are heading. To an easy answer. To an easy solution with no follow ups except maybe a light punishment.

Vanya knows better. If Reginald is looking at her like she’s a threat and ask ‘that’ question, then it’s that he suspicious. This might be the paranoia speaking but in this moment Vanya knows that she’s trapped between two choices: say that yes, she’s forgotten to take her medication and have to take some later to accommodate her father’s wishes to drown her emotions. Or say that no, she hasn’t forgotten to take her and possibly inadvertently convince her dad that the dosage he was giving her wasn’t enough and that he needed to give her even more drugs. Maybe he wouldn’t believe her lie. Maybe he would know that she knows and then he would know that she knows that he knows that she knows about her powers. That she doesn’t need her pills and hasn’t been taking them. This would probably lead to a confrontation of sorts.

She decides she likes option number one better, so she answers that, yes, she had forgotten to take her pills that morning. He looks at her for a moment then, as if deeming her answer a worthy response, nods to himself before telling mom to give her a pill at the end of the meal.

The rest of the meal goes on without much tension. In her siblings heads everything has been resolved without a question from them. Not thinking is the greatest thing a hero can do and apparently her siblings love doing it. She mentally apologizes to them in her head after thinking that thought but only half heartedly.

After the meal she makes a big show of taking her pill and fake swallowing it. Really, she just puts it under her tongue but the gulp she makes faking a dry swallow is enough to convince everybody. Her dad tells her she’s to go to her room and she obeys.

With a pill heavy under her tongue and thoughts swirling around her in her head she heads to her room without talking to any of her siblings. Distantly she wonders when she had become such a good liar. Back at the dinner table she hadn’t lied but she hadn’t told the whole truth either so really she had lied. It wasn’t that she had taken the pill that morning because she hadn’t. It was that she hadn’t told him that she had been skipping her meds since last weekend. Lately she had been doing that a lot. Telling half truths. When somebody would ask her what she was reading she would answer but she wouldn’t say that she was reading because she wanted to have the best escape. When somebody asked her how she was doing she would say ‘okay’ instead of overjoyed, sad or angry.

Her most notable lie was when one of her siblings asked her what she was going to do when she got out of the house. She told them she didn’t know. But really, what she meant was that she would do anything and everything. That she wouldn’t be waiting until she was eighteen to leave simply because she couldn’t. She would leave, maybe not every night, but a lot of nights. She would go anywhere, meet anyone and make a new life right next to her old one. She told this to no one and no one knew to ask.

Twenty three minutes exactly after she gets in her room Vanya fakes going to the bathroom to absolutely no one except possibly Reginald who might be watching her. She goes and very discreetly flushes the pill she’d hidden in her pocket after spitting it out in her room. She then washes her hands and heads back to her rooms, her face devoid of any emotions. Even though she is, in that instant, feeling a lot of emotions.

When she gets to her room she changes into her day clothes again, closes her lights and goes to hide under her blankets. She makes a fake Vanya body pillow type looking thing and then she waits.

She’d decided that she’d wait until it was nine o’clock to do what she’d mentally dubbed “The Second Great Escape of Vanya Hargreeves”. Maybe the title was a bit cheesy but she liked it and it’s not as if she’d ever tell anybody that she’d called it that or that she even did this. Well, maybe she would tell Five when they both became adults. Of course to be adults you need to have an actual name, not that she’d ever tell Five that. For some reason he didn’t want a name. She didn’t really get it but it was his choice.

When the digital alarm clock that she’d taken under the covers changes with red blinking number to nine o’clock she decides it’s time to go. She quietly gets out from under her covers and goes to open the window. She careful to not make it squeak too much, matching her movements with the sound of the rushing wind from outside. 

Once she has the window open she climbs down the side of the building into the same alleyway she’d been weeks ago. She hadn’t been back to that alley since then, not that she would’ve wanted to. She’s not about to complain about it though. If there wasn’t an alley and the academy had simply been built directly next to another building she couldn’t have even escaped in the first place. 

She walks out onto the streets. She quickly hurries to her first stop, avoiding the streets lamps so that if somebody is watching from the house they hopefully won’t see her.

Her first stop is a diner a few streets away. She’s probably just going to buy a milkshake or something because even if she did manage to scrounge up some money from her siblings it’s not a whole lot. So she’s going to have to ration to have enough money to go to all the places she wants to go to.

When she gets there she crosses her fingers for luck, hoping a friend is on the other side of the door. She pushes the door and enters.

The diner itself is almost empty with only a few customers her and there going about their business. There’s a waitress who looks overworked serving coffee to a man with a trucker hat that looks like he’s about to fall over. As soon as the waitress spots her said waitress puts up a fake smile and heads over to where Vanya is standing. Vanya feels awkward as she tries to not make a big deal of the fact that she’s a child alone at night going to a diner. The waitress doesn’t seem to be too concerned though so Vanya figures it’s okay. Then again this is New York so this just probably isn’t the weirdest thing she’s ever seen. The waitress leads her to a booth next to a window and hands her a menu.

This is nothing like the books. There’s nobody that stands out in the diner. She’s not sure how she could even go talk to the people around without it being weird. Vanya thinks to herself that this is decidedly underwhelming . Nothing is happening and she doesn’t know what to do to make something,anything, happen. Maybe this is going to harder than she first thought.

When the waitress comes back to ask her what she’s having, Vanya simply answers that she wants a strawberry milkshake and almost forgets toadd the please add the end of her sentence. She tries to strike up a conversation with the waitress, she really does. But she can’t think of anything to say so she simply stays silent.

A few minutes later the waitress comes back with Vanya’s milkshake. It tastes good, she likes it. What she doesn’t like is how she’s just sitting there doing nothing. Maybe this just isn’t where she’s gonna make friends. She finishes her milkshake quickly and then pays for it before quickly exiting the diner.

She goes to her second choice, a coffee shop a block away. But yet again she doesn’t find any opportunity to make friends. With two tries down her belt she has to wonder if maybe the problem isn’t that there nobody to make friends, but rather that she’s the problem. That she’s the reason she can’t make friends easily. That taking her pills for so long has somehow messed her up and now she can’t just be normal anymore. Or rather that her new normal is never going to be normal enough for everyone else.

After sulking for a while outside she decides to keep going just because she can. She decides to switch things up and not go to the other coffeehouse like she had planned but instead to go to the bakery she’d seen when she was out on her first “big escape”.

She gets to the bakery and finds it still open. She looks at the hours to get an idea of what time it is and sees that the bakery closes at ten thirty. That means it’s probably around ten.

She enters the bakery and doesn’t expect the joyful hello that greets her. There’s a man behind the counter. He seems happy and has his attention on her. Those are two things she hasn’t ever really ever had from an adult so for her this is all new territory. There’s almost nobody in the bakery. The only person there besides her is the man who greeted her and a girl about her age.

“Hello!” she says because when someone says hi to you it’s only polite to say it back.

“What can I get you young lady?” He says never dropping the polite but honest smile adorning his face.

She’s not sure what she should get. She’s never been to a bakery before and making her own choices without any adult supervision is kind of a new thing for her. So instead she asks “What do you have that’s good?”.

He moves his gaze from her to the display of pastries and sweets in front of him and, after a moment, snaps his fingers before looking back enthusiastically at her.

“I’ve got some good puff pastries!” He finally says.

She doesn’t know what those are but she takes his word for it and nods at him. He seems to take this as a sign that she wants those. He opens the display in front of him and puts the pastries on a plate. He then closes back the display and beckons her to the cash register. He hands her the plate with the pastries but when she goes to pay him he stops her with waving hands.

“On the house. The pastries have been there all day so I’d have to throw them out anyway.” He says still smiling at Vanya.

This is probably one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for her. She has to wonder if all adults are like this and her “dad” is just that much of a bastard or if the man in front of her is the exception. She doesn’t know the answer and she doesn’t think asking him would bring about an answer she would care for so instead she thanks him.

She decides to be brave and go sit down at the table where the girl that’s probably around her age is reading what looks like a very big book of some kind. When she sits down on the chair facing the girl she has the time to see a glimpse of what’s written in the book before it’s closed with a snap. Something about legal procedures.

When Vanya looks up she sees the girl eyeing her and then her puff pastries. She seems a bit closed off but intrigued as to why Vanya just sat down with her.

“What are you doing here?” asks the girl.

“Buying pastries and looking for a friend” Vanya answers honestly

The girl seems unsatisfied with the answer. Vanya has to wonder if what she said was either too straight forwards or too desperate. Maybe it’s not too late to backtrack and just say something else. But before she has the time to do so the girl starts speaking again.

“No no, I didn’t mean it like that. I meant what are you doing out at like almost ten without any parent supervision going to random bakeries?” 

Vanya’s not sure what she should say. A lie or the truth. On one side if she tells a lie maybe the girl will be able to tell. On. The other side she doubts that the girl would believe her story. Maybe if she used her powers to blows something up again then the girl would believe her. Then again property damage isn’t something she wants to be known for and the man running the bakery had been nice so causing something of his to explode would be unwarranted.

Instead she decides to do what she been doing a lot of lately. Telling half truths and half lies. The truth within a lie if you will.

“My family sucks and I was hoping to make a friend by going around different shops and trying to talk to people.” she finally says.

For a moment the girl in front of her looks at her as if assessing if she’s lying or not. After a moment she seems to believe her giving her a quick “alright” before opening her book and continuing reading where she’d left off.

“What about you? Why are you out so late at night?” asks Vanya trying to make conversation.

“My dad owns the shop. He used to be a police officer but after one too many close calls and family waiting for him at home he decided to just quit and go open a bakery” the girl answers.

Her Vanya continue asking each other questions and talking about random things for a while. Apparently the girl’s name Eudora and she wants to be a police officer just like her father was when she grows up. Vanya manages to dodge a few sensitive questions and at the end of the night thinks she might have a new friend. She asks Eudora if she thinks they’re friends.

“Of course we are.” she says in a tone that lets no room for misunderstandings or doubt.

It’s not long before it’s time for the bakery to close. Vanya isn’t sad that she didn’t get to go to the other coffeehouses as much as she is to have to leave her new friend. She leaves with a promise to come back as soon as she can. Eudora looks at her funny before saying “alright”.

The walk back to the house takes less time than Vanya would’ve wanted. It’s not long before she’s climbing back up through her window and changing into her night clothes before slipping into her bed. She knows she can’t go out to often because then Reginald would become suspicious of her tiredness and start keeping a closer eye on her and she didn’t want that.

But still, in a week or two she would go out again and meet her new friend (new friend!!!) Eudora at the bakery. They would talk and she would be happy with doing just about anything. They could simply sit in the same room not talking to anyone and Vanya would be happy.

Vanya falls asleep with thoughts of new friendships and making plans. She doesn’t know it yet but she’s just changed the whole world again, and maybe, the world had just changed her just a little bit.

In a far away office a machine starts typing out numbers. Hundred, thousands of numbers. Things are going wrong and nobody has yet to notice and won’t for a while. An employee quietly disappears from where they were sitting waiting for their next assignment but also from the memories of everyone working there. 

It’s hard to pinpoint the epicentre of a nuclear explosion, it takes a while because of how big it is. Throw in other nuclear explosions around it and it would probably be impossible to tell which one went off first and triggered the others. In that sense Vanya is the nuclear bomb and the timeline is the epicentre. It would’ve been easier to see that she was what went wrong had it not been for one fact. Or rather one person, acquainted and related to Vanya, being affected by this change. It doesn’t help the time management office that they had hired her brother to go all across space and time to go kill people.

With this change of employees they would send other people like maybe Hazel and ChaCha to do the work. They would probably kill bystanders, bystanders who had families and who would be affected by this. Families that would be changed forever and therefore change their actions.

The machine churns out numbers and the world continues to change and change. The time management office doesn’t know it yet but to put it simply as a wise woman once did: “Honey, you’ve got a big storm coming”.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you liked it
> 
> Go check out my tumblr @whooly-shep if you want although I don’t post a lot on it


	5. Chapter 5

In the morning Vanya wakes up and it feels like it all was a dream. But she knows it wasn’t, she’s not creative enough to make up an entire person. She’d probably get stuck on imagining the face before giving up.

She’s somehow managed to wake up earlier than she needed to even though she went to bed at around half past eleven the night before. The small throbbing headache promises this to be a “great” day. This might as well happen.

Vanya almost keels over when she gets out of bed ten minutes earlier than usual. She has to sit down at the foot of her bed and take a moment to catch her breath before she stands back up. It would seem that mixing prescription withdrawal with sleep withdrawal maybe wasn’t the best idea.

She goes to take a shower, gets dressed and then she heads down to breakfast. Said breakfast is a quiet affair with her siblings acting unusually tame, even under Reginald’s watch. Luther’s looking at her again except this time she can make out what the emotions on his face mean. He’s feeling guilty, for what reason she can’t even begin to guess what goes on in that head of his. She’s glad that she can at least pin a name on it.

The day goes on very slowly and arduously, she feels like shit. That may be an understatement. Through out the day she almost runs into a wall a total of seven times which is a bit ironic. Vanya feels like the universe is playing with her and taunting her at the same time. Like how a cat would play with a new toy before eventually discarding it somewhere.

There’s a constant pressure to not fuck up that follows her during the week and she has to remind herself multiple times to not show any strong emotions. To not show too much excitement when Allison asks her if she wants to go paint their nails during break. To not show the flinch that goes through her body when Ben tells her he can’t go out one a mission with them because she isn’t special even though she is. But she’s not about to lay that claim out in the open, she knows better.

But most of all she hates every snark and remark, every dismissive glance and actions from none other than her father. She hates it. Before maybe he could’ve convinced her that he was in the right to act like he did but now that she knew that he didn’t even really have a reason to treat her like he did she didn’t let him belittle her. At least not in her own mind. She wouldn’t let anything he said haunt her into the dead of night. Making her ask herself why why why, why she couldn’t be special, why she couldn’t ever be enough, why just because he implied that she couldn’t ever be happy she never would be.

On more than one occasion she has to go lock herself up in her room to not cry in front of anybody. It’s not that she’s really sad, it’s just that it’s all so overwhelming, new and foreign. Feeling that is. Feeling everything and anything at any moment and not knowing why. It makes her skin buzz with an energy she can’t quite describe and makes her feel like she might explode.

One time Diego walks in on her while she’s balled up on her bed crying her eyes out. She can only assume he’d meant to go to his own bedroom but had tired from training and mistaken her bedroom for his. He’d done a double take when he’d noticed how hard she was crying. Probably since he’d never seen her this broken up over anything before. Then again she never physically could have felt this bad before so his reaction wasn’t totally unwarranted.

He’d looked like he wanted to just go back out the way he came from and pretend he hadn’t seen anything. Of course Diego ever with the slight hero complex seemed to decide against it, sighing and closing the door behind him before walking over to her bed.

Maybe it was the guilt from having been the one to break her violin or the knowledge that he was part of the reason she had been locked in her room with almost no food for a few days when their dad found out she’d broken the violin. Either way whatever it was was enough to make him hug her.He’d stayed there for a few minutes until she stopped crying. She asked him to not tell anybody else about her crying and he’d easily accepted. Maybe he thought she was embarrassed or something to have been seen crying. She didn’t even attempt to explain why she didn’t want anybody to know. He was gone in the blink of an eye, probably feeling awkward from all that.

Back when she’d come out after those days Diego had looked at her with the same look Luther had been giving her since her violin broke. She’d been deep in thought back then trying to figure out what all those emotions and looks on their faces meant when her father had coughed to get her attention.

He had asked her if she had learnt her lesson and she had nodded. He had looked pleased with himself like she had been taught some important wisdom of life or something. She hadn’t. They hadn’t exchange any other words. He hadn’t known to ask for what had really happened so she hadn’t had to tell. A lie by omission. She had looked it up in a dictionary after the fourth time she had told one.

A week and a half after her last escapade she decided to go see Eudora again. She’d spent almost all of her mandatory free time locked in her room thinking about what she would do once she saw her friend(her friend!!!) again. Eudora had told her that she always spent the end of the day with her father till closing time. Her mother was apparently a very busy but very kind woman. Eudora had told Vanya a few stories about her mother and now Vanya’s new mission in life was to meet the woman.

When she sneaks out that night, she does so with almost no worries. She walks down the streets she had last time and reaches the bakery without even one single thing stopping her. As she enters the bakery, Vanya absentmindedly thinks that maybe the reason the universe had to mess with her to balance out the good. It would make sense that to get the good you need to go through the bad. At least that’s what she tries to tell herself two weeks later when Five disappears.

She’s scared. Oh so scared and this time it’s not for her. She’s scared that he did what he said and went further into the future. She’s scared that he went so far he won’t come back. That wherever he went it’s worse than here and isn’t that a thought. Maybe he went to the end of the earth when the sun collapses in on itself and the planet gets burn to a crisp. Or maybe he went backwards in time instead of going forwards and now he’s stuck in the past and one day she’ll see him in a painting of the founding fathers or something.

She spends the week in a daze. She doesn’t feel anything most of the time and it’s not even because of her medication this time. It scares her. This time she can’t stop it from happening just by deciding not to take her pills. She not just scared of anything, she’s scared of herself, that all the things she’s been doing for the last few months mean nothing and that soon she won’t mean anything at all anymore.

The only one of her brothers who ever cared about her without any pretences looming over their relationship. She can’t bear to think that he’ll never come back. Every night during the next week she goes down to the kitchen and makes him a peanut butter and marshmallow sandwich. She leaves it out and hopes with everything she is that when she’d come down in the morning it would be gone.

On the first morning after she’d started making the sandwiches she’d come down to find it gone. She had been so excited that she’d ran to Five’s room and burst through his door without even knocking. But then he hadn’t been there. She’d run around the house but she hadn’t found him. She didn’t know then that her mom had just thrown out the sandwich she’d made because it had been left out for a while. She only found out later when she asked her who ate her sandwich. After getting her answer Vanya asked her mom to not throw them out, she would do it. And she did, every single morning the week following five’s disappearance she would come down and see her sandwich where she’d left it. With tears almost spilling from her eyes she’d go and throw it in the garbage.

She couldn’t let it be seen that she was sad even if her sadness was tearing her apart. Her father wouldn’t let any big show of emotions be tolerated. So even when she wanted to scream at anything that garnered her annoyance or when her eyes were red from from all the crying she did in her bedroom she wouldn’t let it show. Her ‘dad’ didn’t even look at her so she didn’t have to pretend as much as she’d originally thought she would have to.

But her siblings noticed. At least, some of them did. Diego and Luther we’re looking more and more frequently at her with the same look in their eyes and the same expressions on their faces. Once they’d caught each other staring at her. They’d had an entire conversation through eye contact and although she wasn’t the best at picking up non-verbal communication she was able to guess that they were probably telling each other that they would have a conversation later.

Ben is too busy keeping his head down both metaphorically and literally to notice or pay attention to her. That’s fine with her, she’s not sure how she would deal with it. Klaus is too busy trying through out the week to not another panic attack and getting sent to ‘private training’. Allison is off on another world and most of the time Vanya is too busy and tired to try to understand her only sister. She’s not a psychologist and she doesn’t think she’s ready to see her sister any other way than the two dimensional character she pretends to think she is. She’s not ready to drop the status quo of the whole family and burn everything to the ground. Maybe if she were braver she would call out Reginald and do something different but she isn’t so she keeps quiet suffers the consequences of her inaction.

It only takes her a week to break. She’s in the library reading something and when someone comes in the room and she assumes it’s Five because usually no one else comes to read books in the afternoon. She’s reading something funny and she thinks Five would like it so she calls out to him...

It wasn’t him. It was Ben.

She gets up quickly and leaves almost running to her room. She stays there even through the afternoon lessons. She lays on her bed even when her mom comes to ask her what’s wrong. She just tells her that she feels sick and won’t be coming down for supper. She’s under her blankets when someone comes knocking on her door and then after a moment opens it leaving something and then closing it again before leaving. She makes sure to listen to the steps and waits until whoever that was is gone before checking out what they left.

When she eventually decides to get up she sees that somebody left her leftovers of what had apparently been supper. Chicken, peas and mashed potatoes. Probably her mom. There’s a fork and no knife on the plate. Maybe it wasn’t her mom because only her siblings know that she doesn’t eat chicken with a knife, she uses her fork to tear out the meat. It tastes like ashes and cold coal.

She’s reckless as she goes out that night. Not even bothering to not make any noise or change out of her uniform before she’s out the window. Everything’s going fast, the cars going past her, the people who hurry to get home and her heartbeat, pounding like a drum desperately trying to get out of her chest. The night sky up above is clear and the stars shine dimly. It’s unusually quiet for a Saturday night in New York.

She gets to the bakery before she even realizes that’s where she’s going. There’s a bell that rings as she enters the shop. Eudora stares up from whatever books she reading up on, probably something about law or police work, before something in her face shifts.

It’s not long before she’s getting up from where she’s sitting and walking over to Vanya. She’s hugging her and it’s too much and everything she needs and everything she wanted. Someone to care. She doesn’t think she’s ever felt like someone or anyone has really ever cared for her like this simple friend is caring for her right now.

She’s on the ground sobbing in Eudora’s before she even knows what’s going on. Distantly she notes the sound of glass exploding somewhere in the background but she doesn’t really care about that. Eudora turns her head quickly before looking back at Vanya, never letting her go.

That night for the first time in a while she tells the whole truth. She tells Eudora and her dad about her own dad. About the academy. About how she and her siblings have been treated since they were babies. She tells them about the powers she didn’t know she had until a little while ago. She tells them about her brother and how now he’s gone and she doesn’t know what to. She surprised when they believe her. Maybe it’s because they both saw her make a glass jar explode, which she feels guilty about, but they believe her. Eudora’s dad makes her a hot chocolate and puts two churros on a small plate for her. He goes to put the ‘closed’ sign on the door and they talk all night about a lot of things. She stops feeling sad and empty inside a bit and instead she feels reluctant happiness. It’s a warm summer night and for the first time in a while Vanya thinks maybe things will be okay.

Somewhere else in space and time a boy, THE boy, is in a cafe talking with his now big sister. The world is alright in that moment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for not updating in a while, I’ve been busy. Anyway I hopefully will have the next chapter out soon enough. Leave a comment with a question if you’d like and I might andwer it honestly. Also if you notice any mistakes please tell me, thank you.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lmao, sorry.

It’s hard to get up the morning after she visits the Patches is hard, it always is. She always just feels tired when she wakes up from her nightly excursions. It’s not the physical exhaustion that gets to her, she’s used to staying up late because she likes reading books. No it’s not that, she’s just emotionally exhausted of it all. She doesn’t want to live in her house anymore or even be herself. Most of the time she just wants to swap lives with some random kid on the street. Then she remembers that that would be cruel to that kid. But still, a selfish part of her says that maybe she’s just a kid too, that maybe it’s too cruel for her too.

Maybe she should move in with Eudora and her family. They seem nice enough and Eudora’s older brother moved out to San Francisco at the beginning of the summer for his job so they have an empty room. Plus most of the Patch family already knows about her powers so that’s one less thing to worry about. They wouldn’t freak out about a vase or something breaking while she’s in the middle of a panic attack. Then again her dad would probably try to get her back and blame the Patches for child kidnapping which wouldn’t be a very good thing. She’ll keep that plan on the back burner until she’s at least sixteen or seventeen and not thirteen.

She gets up and dressed as usual, it is after all a normal day in the Hargreeves household and nothing majorly has happened yesterday. At least of course to the rest of the Hargreeves nothing important happened. Vanya knows that’s not the case because for once she’s the one who’s in the know and everybody else is the outsider. Maybe it doesn’t work like that but she doesn’t care. Somebody cares about her enough to not care about her powers and that means more than any poisonous words her father has ever spouted at her. Funny how all it took for her to not care anymore was a glass exploding and a simple friendship.

She exits her rooms and heads down the corridor towards the staircase. On her way she sees that Diego’s bedroom door is open. It’s an unusual sight as Diego always closes his door. She continue walking but extends her hearing to listen in on what’s going on. She’s been doing that a lot lately, extending her hearing that is. Now she can hear anything from miles away as if it was happening right next to her. She’s been using her powers to try to learn Spanish. Eudora and her dad sometimes speak in Spanish. She wants to surprise them one day by just speaking Spanish in the middle of a random sentence.

She stops in her tracks when she hears her name being called all the way from Diego’s room. It’s unusual for her siblings to talk about her, usually they just avoid her unless she directly addressing them so for one of them to be speaking about her there must be something going on.

She’s extends her hearing like she’s been doing a lot recently and is surprised to find that a civil conversation between Diego and Luther is happening. Usually those two can’t even stand to be in the same room, something really must be going on if they’re setting aside their differences to talk about ‘her’ of all things.

“I mean it’s not that she doesn’t care about us but now she’s all different and it makes no sense. Then there’s all the weird things she’s been up to lately. I don’t know what’s going on but one time I found Vanya crying her eyes out. She didn’t even do that that one time dad hit her when she went to the backyard instead of going to class and couldn’t see why it was wrong.” Diego says.

“What do you think is going on?” Luther asks in a neutral tone. She knows that tone to mean he’s actually thinking about what he’s saying because he uses it when he’s trying to answer questions in history class with Pogo. History isn’t his strong suit so he tries hard to make up for it.

“I don’t know, all I know is it can’t be good. We might have to keep an eye on her.”

“Do you really it’s really a big thing or that it’s just her missing her violin because you broke it?” Luther asks honestly albeit tactlessly. Diego of course doesn’t take it well.

“YOU’RE the one who threw ME, how is it my fault that I landed on her. If you threw a chair and it hit dad, you’re the one who would get punished! Not the damned chair!” Diego says loud enough that she probably would’ve heard it without extending her hearing.”

“Yes but a chair isn’t sentient so...” she stops listening. No use in hearing something she’s been hearing her whole life, her two dumbass brothers arguing. Instead she resumes walking towards breakfast, she’s kinda peckish.

She’s of course stopped again just as she begins walking by Allison coming out of the bathroom, spotting her and then heading her way with a certain gleam in her eyes that tell Vanya she needs to stay put or else she’ll get rumoured to do so. Allison’s towel that’s wrapped around her waist says that she just got out of the shower her semi-dry hair tells another story.

Vanya really wonders if Allison just spent ten minutes waiting for Vanya to come down to breakfast. She could have, the bathroom unnecessary keyhole is big enough that you can see a bit of the hallway. But if she really did, then what did she want from Vanya?

“Can we talk? Just for like a minute.” Allison says very un-Allison like.

“Yeah, sure.”

After Vanya says her words she expects something to happen, as if he words were to be a match that would light a gas fire. For Allison to get mad at her like her dad has because five is gone and not her, or for her to break down crying about something. Maybe even to be on the receiving end of a rant about how it’s unfair that she can’t meet her fans.

But none of those things happen. Vanya’s words hang in the air, shrivelling up and crumbling into dust. There is only an awkward quiet as Allison seems to, for once, not be able to say her piece. As if her words were stuck in her throat. But she couldn’t keep them there forever Vanya thought. Like bile she would vomit them up onto the floor. Half digested and putrid, Vanya probably wouldn’t like them. There’s a look on her face that Vanya can’t quite understand the meaning of, she’s learned recently that she’s bad at reading emotions.

Then, as if she hadn’t just been standing there staring at floorboard next to Vanya’s shoes, Allison starts speaking again. That look completely wiped off her face.

“You know what? Never mind” she says while turning away.

Maybe in another universe Vanya would have let Allison walk away. Let her off the hook to be on her merry way. Not even trying to guess what her sister wanted to talk to her about and simply be on her way too. But this is not that universe, and this is not that that Vanya. So instead she pushes. Pushes to know more because for once in her life she’s decided she’s not letting things go.

“Allison, what is it? These days you never talk to me unless you have to therefore this must be important. So just tell me.”

Apparently it’s the wrong thing to say. Then again, maybe it’s exactly the right thing to say because Allison turn sharply back to Vanya and that look Allison had on her face is back again. Maybe even stronger. She also looked shocked at Vanya’s boldness.

“Alright, I just wanted to, I don’t know? Apologize, I know five was close to you and the rest of us have done a pretty good job at not not even being in a mile radius to you. This isn’t easy for any of us but I think it’s the hardest for you. Not just losing five but being here. So yeah, I just wanted to apologize for everything and ask you how are.” Allison finishes of with a deep inhale and a sigh, kind of like she does when dad makes her run.

Vanya can tell the words were rehearsed. She knows they weren’t untruthful, she can tell when her sister is lying based on her heartbeat. Allison probably spent some time thinking about what she wanted to say and that’s why she sounds like she rehearsed, because she probably did.

“Alright, I’m, I don’t even know how I’m feeling right now. I’m sure that if I knew I would tell anybody. But thank you for apologizing. When I figure things out and I’m ready I’ll tell you.” She says. Eudora and her dad have been trying to teach her ‘emotional maturity’ because apparently when you’ve had the emotional range of a shoe for most of your life you might need some ‘guidance’ on how to deal with and interpret your feelings.

Maybe Allison expected something else but if she’s disappointed by Vanya’s answer she doesn’t let it show. Instead she just nods understandingly and tells Vanya she’ll see her at breakfast before hurrying to her room to go change into clothes.

Vanya, once again, starts walking towards breakfast. She hopes that Ben and or Klaus won’t decide to suddenly try to talk to her about how she feels because that would a bit too much talking about her and how she feels in one day. Then again the universe has never been kind to her so it wouldn’t come as a surprise if they randomly popped up.

She manages to get to the table without any further incidents. Later, all of her siblings arrive in no particular order to eat. He dad is once again putting one of his gramophone discs on. At least the narrator for this one doesn’t have a grating voice. She’s quietly sipping on her water trying to remember how to conjugate the verb nadar in Spanish when suddenly a crackling sound brings her attention to the table overhead.

She’s the only one who looks up at the sound and that’s probably because nobody else can hear it. She thinks it’s the particles around the air making that noise. It’s low but steady and increasing in volume. Not enough for the others to notice but enough for her to discern a change in the pitch. It’s familiar and she doesn’t dare hope it’s what she thinks it is.

It doesn’t take long for her father to notice that she’s not eating. He calls her to attention using her number instead of her name like always but she too busy staring up above to move her gaze over to her bastard of a father. He tries calling her name again more scathingly but she doesn’t even spare him an afterthought, still looking up.

By now her siblings have looked up too to see what has caught little Vanya’s interest so much that she’s defying their shared surrogate asshole. They look up in anticipation only to find nothing there and bring their gazes back down. They stare questioningly at Vanya but she hasn’t even noticed anything.

Her father is yelling when stark blue electricity starts cracking above the dining room table. As soon as that happens chaos descends upon her siblings. They all recognize it it too so it takes them less than a moment to start frantically speaking and getting up. Their father tries to bring back order by shouting at all of them but he’s interrupted by a loud electric ‘crack’ and then a wooden ‘crack’.

Number five, the boy, has just fallen onto the dining table. He’s not wearing his usual uniform and is instead sporting jeans and a t-shirt that says ‘Gucci Slut’ on it. He’s laying on his back and his eyes are wide open. He looks as if he’s just seen god and got slapped him in the face by said god. Then his eyes immediately snap to Vanya and he starts talking to her in an urgent voice.

“Vanya! Talk to Me about Your FEELINGs damn it!” He then promptly passes out.

Vanya has never hated the universe as much as she does right now. Somewhere a little girl giggles over the events unfolding.

 

Later that night, Five still hasn’t awoken. Mom is checking his vitals for any signs of potential problems. She tells Vanya that he’s most likely out of it because he time traveled quite a bit. Vanya has never heard of the brand ‘Gucci Slut’ so she can only assume that he must have come from the future, maybe a few years. Then again she’s never seen a boy wear a crop top so maybe fashion had to develop over the years and centuries until boys could wear what girls wear. 

She’s been waiting all day for five to wake up and now that it’s almost night she’s tired of doing it. She just wants to do something, not stand around and twiddle her thumbs while her brother lays in a coma in the infirmary and her siblings go fight crime.

She decides to give an impromptu to the Patches. Her visits tend to be sporadic but she can usually give them an estimate of when she would visit. Sometimes she’d say in the next few days other times like the one from yesterday she’d say in a week. They wouldn’t mind, as Andreas had told her multiple times, their door was always open for her.

When the sun set she waited like a rock waits to become sand after years. An indeterminate amount of time later Vanya steadies herself, ready to go. She’s halfway out the window when Luther walks into her room. They awkwardly look at each other for a second before Vanya speaks.

“Uh, hey.” She says waving her hand.

 

Somewhere elsewhere in time and space and plexiglass the handler is trying to make sense of her reports. It doesn’t help that they are erasing and rewriting themselves as she goes. She tries to call up an employee she knows handles time things well only to find that she can’t remember their name nor what they look like. Let alone who they are. She writes it down in a notebook for later because she knows it might be important.

She’s still shifting through high end reports of very important events when an employee barges into her office. She brings her gaze up to scoff at them but stops when she sees the look of pure horror on their face.

“Ma’am we have another problem.”

“What is it?” She says snappily and a bit fearful.

“You need to come see.”

The employee brings her out to the main dimension room. There is a crowd gathered around one of the screens that displays the pitches at which each individual dimension resonates. The employees notice she’s there and let her pass through. 

The pitch of the universe that has been causing her a migraine all day is on the screen. It shows the pitch as it should. Only then it doesn’t, because the pitch at which the universe resonates changes. They aren’t meant to do that. It only changed by point zero zero one but they aren’t meant to change at all.

Alarms start to blare as things quickly escalate. The emergency protocols for all agents in that universe has been activated. Wether they want to or not they’re all coming back immediately. The handler tries to make a call to stop it but it’s too late. All agents are starting to return and the pitch gate which they use in all suitcases to travel to that universe is closing.

She turns back to the pitch reading on the screen and sees it quickly changing numbers. More and more digits changing until she can’t even remember where one number was.

An employee or two suddenly disappears in her field of vision but she doesn’t really care. Why you may ask? Well because her bosses are going to find out about this mishap. And one they do? She royally fucked. Somewhere else a waitress looks up to see a man enter her restaurant, she finds him kind of cute.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it took so long to update. I know I said I’d update soon but then final exams came around and then I went on a humanitarian collaboration trip and I didn’t have any wifi or cell because I didn’t wanna lose it while I was there and also I didn’t have a lot of time to write this since I forgot my chapter notes at home.
> 
> Anyway, hope you liked this chapter, most if not all of it was written in the last like two days. Also should I do like my other fic where I post on tumblr when there’s been an update? Like with a moodboard cover collage and everything? Tell me in the comments.
> 
> Also follow me ontumblr at whooly shep for more stuff


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> New chapter! Also if you see any typos please tell me in the comments

Vanya still has her foot half out the window when Luther closes the door very seriously. He proceeds to sit down on her bed and then looks at her like she’s the last box on a checklist he’s been skipping over for far too long. Painful to address and possibly only there because it makes the list maker feel guilty not to address it.

“We need to talk.” He says very sullenly. 

“Okay.” She says trying to make her face and eye movements indicate that she is, in fact, not okay with having this conversation. She has somewhere to be and she knows (hopes) that Luther is smart enough to know better. He is after all the team leader, knowing the tells of his team and family are an important part of missions.

Turns out Vanya might have given him too much credit because he picks up on none of it. Instead of saying things like ‘are you sure?’ or even ‘actually never mind’ he just sits there broodingly glaring at the floor, then at her face, then back at the floor.

“Yes?” She says, impatience slipping through her tone. Luther must finally notice that she wants him to either hurry up and speak or shut up and go away because he finally starts speaking and saying words that have an actual deeper meaning behind them besides ‘we need to talk and I’m being mysterious about it’.

“The violin thing, we need to talk about it.” He finally says seemingly angry for some reason.

She doesn’t get why he seems mad. It’s not too obvious but she can usually spot the telltale signs. Then again it’s not that hard, Luther just clenches his fists when he’s mad. Most of the time, when Luther isn’t off mysteriously conversing with diego, his emotions are pretty easy to decode. Like that one code five show her where you just write with the next letter of the alphabet.

“Again, yes?” 

“I, I’m. Uuhhhh why is this so hard. I wanted to say I’m sorry about your violin.”

She’s taken aback by how much of a fuss he was making just to say he’s sorry. Like “That’s it?”. He narrows his eyes at her which probably means she just said that out loud. Shit.

“I just mean that you were making a big fuss out of telling me something so I just assumed it was something way more important. Like you were here to tell me the end of the world was coming or something.”

“But this is important! This isn’t just about your violin, this is about you!” He exclaims. She can almost hear the exclamation points at the end of his sentences.

“What about me?”

“I wanted to apologize when I realized that Diego was probably right and that I was partly to blame for everything that happened. So I waited until you’d look happy enough that my apology would go over well. But then you just, you just never stopped looking sad and angry. So I asked Diego about it and he said he found you crying your eyes out a while ago.”

‘Wow okay, I’m never publicly showing my feelings again.’ Vanya thought privately to herself.

“That’s not normal. You don’t usually cry for nothing. I mean you didn’t even cry when Five disappeared and he was the only one out of us who was being nice to you.” He finishes off emotionally. 

Vanya’s honestly surprised Luther even acknowledged that his actions weren’t the best. Usually he’s too prideful to even let it be insinuated by anyone that he isn’t the best at everything. This really must be serious.

“So what’s going on? Or what has been going on. You’ve been off since we broke your violin and it can’t be that because you don’t actually seem to be too broken up over it.”

“I mean I was but like not that much.”

“Then what’s going on? Crazy things are happening and you’re just smack dab in the middle of them! Do I have to ask directly? What are you feeling? What are your emotions? What’s wrong with you, why are you always so sad?”

Her foot is still halfway out of her window and he’s talking to her about her emotions as well as her mental well-being And she’s still halfway out her damn window. This isn’t awkward at all. It’s not that she doesn’t want to never in a million years talk about her feelings. It’s just that right now, as in the immediate moment isn’t the best time. Not to mention she’s probably not going to talk about her feeling until she’s moved out of the house, let alone reveal her powers dramatically to her siblings before they themselves have moved. And she’s still halfway out her damn window

“Listen, I know you want to deal with this right now because you think that literally everything in life is your fault but I don’t think I’m ready yet to expose all of my emotions to the world and I was kind of sneaking out. Also you only marginally have anything to do with how I feel. I’ll tell you about it later.”

This answer is apparently unsatisfactory to Luther because he opens his mouth again to talk and doesn’t leave.

“When is ‘later?”he asks

“I don’t know. Could be a week, could be a month, could be years.”

“Years!” He exclaims.

“Yes, years.”

“But, why so long?” he genuinely asks.

“It’ll probably make sense when I tell you but just know that I actually do have a reason for not telling.”

“Alright whatever. If you say so.” He says clearly annoyed while leaving her room. She’s glad he closes the door behind him because otherwise another one of her siblings would probably barge in requesting her to share her feelings.

It only took fifteen minutes but she climbs down her windowsill and exits onto the street. Hopefully no random passerby will try to harass her into spilling her feeling.

She manages to get to the bakery with no incident and plops down right next to the one and only Eudora Patch after giving Mr Patch a wave.

“What’s up?” Eudora asks not looking up from her books.

“Do you think I’m cursed?”

“Possibly, but please do elaborate.”

“So today I overheard two of my brothers talking about how me and how I was doing or whatever.”

“Go on.” She says half listening

“Then my sister cornered me to talk about my feelings because that’s not weird at all.”

“Interesting.” Says Eudora clearly focused on her books.

“Then my brother who’s been lost to time reappeared at breakfast with a shirt that said something like ‘Gucci slut’ and then begged me to tell him my feelings.” 

At this Eudora actually looks up from her books and stares at Vanya. Kind of like as if she’s analyzing her. Then she speaks again, this time actually responding to Vanya’s words and not just saying things.

“Okay maybe you are cursed. What else happened?”

“Well I was halfway through my window when suddenly Luther, one of the two brothers who were talking about me, comes into my room. He then also starts begging me to tell him about my ‘feelings’.” She says doing air quotes with her fingers at the word ‘feelings’.

“I would say there is no such thing as a coincidence, but your life is kind of like a bad soap opera with superpowers so I don’t think there is such a thing in your world.”

“But why is this happening?” 

“Maybe the universe is trying to tell you something.” Eudora says. Then she props her face up with her hands and looks Vanya in her eyes. “Tell me, how do you feel Vanya?”she says with a shit eating grin.

“Not you too.”

“No but seriously how are you?” Eudora says seriously.

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I don’t really know what I’m feeling. I spent so long with only the bare minimum in terms of emotions that I don’t even know what all these new feelings and things are. It’s all so much all the time. It’s also kind of annoying that only now people are asking how I feel.”

“And why is that?” Eudora says in a voice that Vanya can only describe as faux fancy.

“Uh, shut up.” She says trying not to laugh, the tremble in her voice gives her away and Eudora giggles a bit.

“It’s just that before all of this nobody asked me how I feel. So yeah maybe I didn’t have a lot of them but at least I could have given a straight answer. Now though, everyone’s asking how I am and I can’t really answer because then they might slip and tell Reginald and then I’ll end up locked up or something.”

“I’d come break you out, dad could knock them out with a baguette.”

“Gee thanks. It’s just, why is that almost all of my siblings that made it clear that they were so above me now want to speak to me about something so personal. I get that Reginald really did a number on all of us and convinced half my siblings that I’m less than them but the other half still managed to know better, why couldn’t they?” 

Vanya realizes she’s crying now. She cries a lot when she hangs out with Eudora and her dad. She doesn’t really mind though, it’s not the kind of crying that makes her feel bad. It’s the other kind where she feels better after.

Eudora takes her hand from across the coffee table and tells her dad to make a hot chocolate. Out of the corner of her eye she sees him heading to the store’s kitchen.

“Thanks.” She says

“It’s no problem.” Eudora answers softly.

“Did you know I’ve been learning Spanish?”

“Oh really?” Eudora says obviously trying to cheer Vanya up. “Do tell me more about this new development.”

“Well I wanted to surprise you and your dad because you’re always nice to me.”

“You know we don’t mind you being here at all right?”

“I know, I just, you’re nice so I wanted to do something nice back.”

“Alright, so then tell me what you’ve learned so far.”

By the time Eudora’s dad comes over with a hot chocolate the two girls are discussing how to make future verb sentences. Vanya’s brain is a bit fried but she thinks she’ll get it in the morning. She doesn’t mind if she doesn’t right now.

 

Later in the night she says goodbye to the Patches, promising she’ll work on her pronunciation. She hates that she has to go but she can’t stay. Even though she really wants to.

The walk back home is as uneventful as the one she took earlier that night. One time she saw a creepy man on the other side of the street and was scared. Luckily he didn’t see her so she got home safe.

She climbs back up through her window and slips into her bed quietly. Sleep comes easy, it has after all been a very long day and she thinks that she probably would have passed out at the bakery if she’d stayed there for another hour.

She wakes up in the morning and doesn’t feel as bad as she thought she would feel the night before. She sees what little bit of sunlight filters through her window from the alleyway and decides that today is another day. Five might wake up and if there’s any sibling she’s going to tell the truth about her powers to, it’s Five.

As she’s getting dressed she decides that she’s going to tell Five about everything later. Not just about her powers but also about the Patches. She thinks she trusts him enough to not ruin one of the few good things she’d had in life. Who knows, maybe he’ll like them so much he’ll want to hang with Vanya and Eudora too. Then maybe he could teleport her whenever they would go to visit. Walking all those streets late at night gets kind of tiresome. The Patches don’t know she lives as far as she does because then they’d insist on helping her get to and from the bakery and Vanya doesn’t want to have to account that whole mess into her life.

Mister Patch had once offered her to move in and she was finding the offer more and more enticing. Sure she would have some things to figure out, like school and legal adoption but she could probably somehow pull it off. She’s smart like that.

With a final glance out her window she heads down to breakfast, hoping that she will see Five at the table.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For this chapter I wanted to write witty Vanya but I had to remove a snippet because the tags say No incest and in this house on the main works we don’t even do implied, anyways it’s just the scene where Luther comes to talk to Vanya and she sasses him in her head. 
> 
> “We need to talk.” He says very sullenly. They’re not dating, wrong sibling, so he probably isn’t here to break up with her.
> 
> I also wanted to make Eudora say inch resting instead of interesting but the meme doesn’t even exist yet so Eudora couldn’t say it. I’ll probably just out it in another fic.
> 
> Anyway hope you enjoyed, check out my tumblr @whooly-shep if you feel like it


	8. Chapter 8

She’s disappointed to find that Five isn’t at the table. Instead she just finds the usual ensemble that is her family already sitting down. She’s almost late but manages to get to her seat before Reginald enters the room so it’s not like he knows better. Unless he decides to use his secret cameras to see if anybody was late. She kind of wishes Five was here. Not for any particular reason, just because she misses him.

Breakfast is almost the same as usual. Reginald decided to play something boring about plant cellulose growth after exposure to low levels of radiation. Truly riveting stuff for breakfast. Food for the mind if you will. Vanya won’t.

Apart from that there is a sort energy within her and her siblings. She notices it right away by how they’re trying just like her no to be too jittery. They’re probably also excited for Five’s return.

Breakfast is so achingly boring and slow that Vanya considers exposing her powers then and there just for something exciting to happen. It beats just sitting there eating her breakfast. She doesn’t consider it seriously but a tiny voice in the back of her head asks her ‘why not?’. She dismisses the voice because that’s not something she can actively let herself want.

She is, for once, happy when her mom tells her that Five is awake and wants to talk to her after breakfast.

Her siblings all seem on the edge of their seats, probably having heard what Mom said. For once, just for once, Vanya is happy that she's considered powerless because she'll get to see Five first.

Breakfast passes fast in a blur of spastic movements and excitement. Vanya is happy when her father leaves with her siblings to supervise their training because she'll get to speak alone with Five.

Walking to the infirmary with her mom she wonders if Five will believe her when she tells him about her powers. She knows that when he left he trusted her but since she can't know what he went through while he was whenever he was she decides that she's gonna let him tell his story before she tells hers.

Once she sees him on the infirmary bed she almost goes over to hug him. She manages to retain herself from doing so but she does run over to his bedside. His eyes snap up at her.

“Hey.”

“Dont’ ‘hey’ me, where have you been!?”

“More like when have I been.”

“Alright then mr sassy, when have you been?”

“The future.” He says solemnly.

“Yeah, no shit. When in the future?”

“Twenty years give or take.”

“And?”

“And we’re all alive except dad.”

“That’s a relief.”

“To know that dad dies?” He asks suspiciously.

“To know he isn’t immortal.”

“Alright, fair point I’ll give you that.”

There’s a moment where they just stare at each other without saying a word. Maybe it’s because neither of them can believe that Five is back, maybe it’s because they’re just glad to be reunited. It doesn’t matter because to Vanya it’s a good moment even if it is short.

“So apart from all of us being alive except dad what else can you tell me about the future?”

“Well I met you future self, she was very secretive about stuff.”

“Uh she's so annoying. Was she secretive like in general or?”

“Stuff about the family. She did freely explain modern stuff to me though. I even met my future self.”

“That must have been weird.”

"Yeah. Things have changed a lot yet they're like really similar."

"So humanity is still just as dumb?" She asks. Five actually laughs a little at that.

"Yeah, it kind of still is."

"Such a shame. Did she say anything else?"

"Actually yes. I didn't really get but she told me to tell you something."

"What did she say?"

"She was being really mysterious near the end of my stay in the future. She said that whatever you would want to tell me you should wait until our fourteenth birthday to tell me."

"Oh."Vanya says crestfallen

"Yeah."

"Well I mean it CAN wait but I wanted to tell you right away. But I guess if future me told you to tell me to wait I guess it can."

"Enough about me, what about you!"

"Not this again."

"Future Vanya said I should pester you about how you feel, constantly."

"I now hate future Vanya, if I ever meet her before I become her I will fight her."

"Wow, you've changed since I last saw you."

"Yeah well that's what happens when you disappear for months into the future." She says swatting his head.

"Alright I get it. Sorry."

"You better not do that again."

"I won't, I was lucky to end up meeting you otherwise I might not have known how to get back."

"How did that happen by the way?"

"Stable time loop. I go back to the past and tell you now where you will need to be. You are there and tell me where you will need to be in the future. I go back and tell you where you need to be. It continues like that."

"How long has this loop been going?"

"Possibly forever."

"Does that mean we have no free will? Since everything that will happen has to happen?"

"Maybe or maybe the universe has set fix points but the rest is just random."

"I prefer that second one."

"Me too."

They talk for a while about things that have been happening in the house and the world. Vanya enjoys their time together. It's been a while since she's been able to talk to one of her siblings without feeling like she's trying to say the right thing or like they're trying to say the right thing.

Still, she's kinda mad at her future self for stopping her present self from telling five about her powers.

But all good things must come to an end and so after maybe an hour mom comes back to the infirmary to tell Vanya has to attend her morning classes. She reluctantly leaves Five.

When she gets to 'class' all her siblings are staring at her. They don't have time to talk before Pogo walks in and starts the lesson.

The lesson that day is really boring, it's about parabolas and Vanya already knows she hates it. Eudora had told Vanya about what she was learning in school. She'd been surprised when Vanya had already learned it two years ago. Now that Vanya thinks about it that's probably her dad's fault.

The class can't finish soon enough. Her siblings head out to the backyard really fast so as to not be late to training. Well, all of them except One. For some reason Luther isn't heading out. Instead he's heading towards Vanya.

"How come you're not going with the others?"

"Dad said I could come to training five minutes later when he made me team leader. I haven't ever really done it until now."

"Why now?"

"Because I needed to ask a question?"

"What question?"

"How is he?" Asks Luther genuinely.

"He's alright. He went to the future and spent a week there then he came back."

"Did he say anything else?"

"No." Vanya lies

"Alright. See you later." He says, words so apparently foreign to his own mouth that he flinches a little when realizes it. Realizes how he has talked so little to his sister that he never felt the need to tell her he would see her later.

"Yeah, later." Says Vanya. She walks out of the 'classroom' and heads towards the library. She's going to need a big book to not think things over a million times in her head until she gets to talk to Five again.

The week goes by fast, faster than Vanya expects it to go. Possibly because it wasn't as bad as she thought it would be. Before she knows it she's off to go see Eudora.

"So you'll never guess what happened!" Yells Vanya as she enters the bakery.

"What?” Asks Eudora looking up from her books.

“Five is back!”

“Oh wow!”

“Yeah.”

“Where was he?”

“The near future in like twenty years or something.” Says Vanya waving her hand around to make her point clearer.

“Twenty years, that’s the near future?”

“Well compared to a thousand years yeah.”

“Got me there. So what happened?”

“He spent a week with me in the future.”

“Oh.”

“And I’m kinda mad at future me.”

“Oh?”

“She told him to tell me that I should wait until our next birthday before telling him anything.”

“Soooo?”

“So that means I can’t tell him about my powers and my nightly escapades and the bakery.”

“Oooh.”

“Yeah I wanted to like introduce him to you guys when he got back.”

“But is it really your future self’s fault if she got told to say this?”

“No it isn’t.” Vanya says with a sigh “I’m just like,not happy about it and I can’t be directly mad at the entirety of the universe for making a time loop so instead I’m mad at her.”

“But... she’s you.”

“How astute of you.” Vanya says grinning

“Oh shut up.” Says Eudora also grinning now.

She stays until midnight talking with Eudora and drinking hot chocolate. Mr Patch brings her some every time she finishes her last and she thanks him every time without fail.

As she’s walking back, Vanya realizes that she might not be able to see Eudora as much as she has because summer is ending. Vanya herself never stops going to school because school is a room in her ‘house’ but Eudora hadn’t been going to school since mid June. Now though, since she was going to go back to school she might have to go to sleep earlier.

Vanya is scared of that. That she won’t be able to go any night and find Eudora there. That if she’s ever having a crisis her best friend won’t be there. At least she knows that Andreas will be there.

Her climb back into her room is just as uneventful as her walk. She goes to sleep quickly and then it’s morning again. It’s going to be fall soon. She can feel it in how her feet feel colder than the rest of her body even though the summer heat is still very much present.

Once she finishes getting dressed she gets ready to head down to breakfast, only someone knocks on her door. Vanya can’t help but sigh tiredly. Before nobody use to knock on her door, she would have the mornings to herself. So maybe she would crave one of her siblings coming to talk to her once in a while. Now though, whenever someone knocks on her door they’re most certainly coming to talk to her about her emotions or some other stuff that she can’t talk to them about. 

She opens her door and is happy to see that Five is there.

“Can I come in?”

“Yeah, sure.”

He comes in and sits down on her bed like he used to before he vanished, legs too short to reach the floor. The familiar scene makes Vanya think that maybe things between them could pick up again where they left off, best siblings forever, as if there hadn’t been a long period where they hadn’t seen each other.

“So I got the green light from mom last night that I was free to leave the infirmary.”

“Oh, that’s good!”

“Yeah, I went to tell you but you weren’t there.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“So like, I may have started doing nightly escapades once every week.”

“Good on you.”

“What?”

“Well you‘re always either cooped up in the library or in your room playing the violin. I think it’s a good thing you’ve taken to going out more, even if going out at night is kinda dangerous I’m not gonna be the one to tell you to stop doing it.”

“Oh, okay.”

“Speaking of your violin playing, I haven’t heard it all week even though I’ve been back for a while. I know for a fact that it can be heard all the way to the infirmary.”

“My uh, violin broke.”

“Wait really? How?”

“I guess Luther and Diego were fighting about something and Luther threw Diego out of his room. I was in the hallway so he landed on top of me and broke my violin.”

“That sucks.” Says Five genuinely “How did dad react?”

“I said I broke it so he punished me for a while.”

“Why did you take the fall for them?” Asks Five seemingly angry

“I don’t know. Those few weeks were weird.”

“Weird how?”

“A lot of stuff was going on and then dad found out about the violin thing and all in all it was kinda shitty.”

“What do you do with your time now?”

“Mostly just read or something else.”

“What’s the something else?”

“Can’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

“My future self said not to.”

“Urgh I regret telling you now.”

“I regret you telling me too but apparently you’re gonna have to wait until our next birthday.”

“This sucks.”

“I also agree.”

“Can’t you give me a hint? Like a short enigma?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Suffer.” She says laughing. After a bit Five joins in.

“So I kinda have something to tell you.” Says Five

“Oh?”

“Well during my trip to the future I decided that I want a name.”

“What made you change your mind about not having one?”

“Stuff that happened. I’ll tell you when I feel like I can articulate it well enough.”

“Alright, do you have an idea for your name yet?”

“Not really.”

“Well we could come up with one now if you want to.”

“Sure, we’ve got time before breakfast starts.”

“How much time?”

“Like thirty minutes.”

“I’ve named my pet rock in less time.”

“Wait you have a pet rock?”

“Yeah.”

“And you never told me?”

“Rockemethy the third was only pet rock for a day, he wasn’t that important.”

“Alright, I’ll believe you... for now.”

“So what do you think fo Charles?”

“Too basic, plus we already have someone with a basic name in this family.”

“Who? Not me I hope.”

“No, Ben.”

“Oh, Ben is considered a basic name?”

“Uh. Yeah?” Says Five like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “It’s not even an abbreviation for Benjamin it’s just Ben.”

“How do you know his full name isn’t Benjamin and dad just hasn’t been calling him that for some reason?”

“I’ve seen his birth certificate.”

“Wait actually? Have you seen mine?”

“Yes and yes.”

“Where is it?”

“Under the floorboards beneath dad’s desk.”

“How did you find them under all of that?”

“One time he wanted to test me to see if I could teleport with big things. He was being reckless honestly. He asked me to teleport his desk out onto the backyard so I decided to just do it but too well.”

“So you also teleported stuff around the desk?”

“Exactly.”

“Smart.”

“But then he got really mad when I accidentally took off the top of the safe he has under his desk.”

“Classic bastard move.”

“Wow you really have changed.”

“Oh?”

“You’d never say anything bad about anybody before I disappeared.”

“Well I learned to no internalize my aggressive feelings and instead pour them into something productive, best decision I’ve ever made.”

“Did you somehow manage to get a psychologist while I was gone?”

“No, trust me if I somehow managed to get a psychologist then that would mean I wouldn’t need to still be in this house.”

“Then what’s holding you back from just leaving?”

“Unfinished business.”

“How ominous.”

“I know.”

“I’m guessing it’s gonna take a while for you to finish your unfinished business.”

“Your guess is correct.”

“And I’m guessing your unfinished business has something to do with the thing your future self told me to tell you.”

“Once again, you are correct.”

“Then help me find a name.”

“What?”

“There’s no use in asking you since you’ll only tell me when the time comes, in the meanwhile we can talk about something else.”

“Alright.”

Before breakfast they managed to come up with a name. Quentin. It’s old fashion and has a first letter that isn’t used a lot at the beginning of words which makes Quentin feel like he just has to have it. Now everytime Vanya thinks about Quentin she has to stop herself from calling him Five in her mind. She knows this won’t be too much of an issue, just something she’ll have to get used to. She managed it for all of her other siblings and herself, she’ll probably manage it for Quentin too.

The passes by fast and Vanya is happy. All of her siblings are surprised to see that Quentin is just back at the dinning table. Almost as if nothing had happened. They quickly get over it but Vanya knows her siblings will probably chew out Quentin after training. She also knows that he probably won’t say a word.

Everything is good for once. So it really shouldn’t be a surprise when things inevitably go bad, again.

Vanya is dreaming, exept it feels more like a memory than a dream. She in a grey room sitting on a grey bed. Suddenly her dad comes in and asks something of Allison.

Vanya wakes up in cold sweat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading. Also special thanks to the lovely GinnyBloomPotter who let me borrow her name for Five. You should definitely check out her fic Ask Yourself Now Where You Would Be (Without Days Like These) it’s really good 100% recommend.
> 
> Also check out my tumblr @whooly-shep if you want, also check out my other fic, it’s not umbrella academy but you just might like it


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vanya hates Mondays

She doesn't know what to do. She's panicking. She’s trying to breathe in but all she can manage to do is gasp and flail like a fish out of water left out on a dock waiting to do die.

Between the thoughts swirling around in her head and the powers she’s losing her grasp on she manages a thought manages to make it’s way through everything else. A thought she hates before she even knows what it is she’s doing. Even if she hates it she still does it.

She takes a pill she’d hidden under her pillow.

She hates the feeling of the foreign object going down her throat. She can’t risk waiting to get even more upset so she takes it without water, dry. She almost jokes on it but somehow manages to make herself drool a bit to ease things.

It only takes a minute, but that’s all it takes for things to dull out, for the thoughts and feelings whirling around in her head like crazed birds to calm. For the pill to take affect.

Even though the pill is already working it’s magic and taking away her feelings one by one like a greedy banker, she can’t help but sob. It’s odd, that she can still cry even when she’s made everything else shut down.

She tries to make sense of her dream. Because she can tell her dream wasn’t just that, that her dream was a memory. One she’d managed to bury deep down underneath where she hid everything and anything.

“I heard a rumour you think you’re just ordinary.”

She almost throws up.

Those words, those words are imbedded in her. In the core of who she is, of who she would have been. A single rumour for a single girl with more power than anybody else in the entire world.

It’s obvious now that she’s not on the brink of a panic attack that Reginald Hargreeves is responsible for this. Like everything else in her life. Because why would a four year old Allison rumour Vanya into being ordinary? Wouldn’t that be counter productive to ‘the mission’? Not if Reginald told her to do it.

She probably doesn’t even remember it. If she does she probably doesn’t even understand the meaning of the memory. After all, Vanya is just Vanya, ordinary boring number seven. Another thing she can thank Reginald for.

But still, she’s mad at Allison. She can’t help it, she already feels sort of bad about it, or at least as bad as she can currently feel while on unknown drugs. She’s mad at Allison and she hates it. That she’s mad at the messenger and not the one who sent the message.

She’s tired, not just physically. She’s tired, of having to spend all her days locked up inside. She’s tired of pretending she’s less than nothing and that that’s how it should be. But most of all she’s tired of coming back here. In her bed, crying because of something the man who should’ve been her father has done

She’s tired of the repetitiveness of it all. The monotony of playing her life over and over again on the same pitch. Never changing too much or enough.

She’s tired.

So she goes to sleep.

 

The next morning she wakes up and she wishes she wouldn’t. Because honestly, not being conscious is better than this.

But still, she has things she needs to do. So she goes down to breakfast.

Time keeps on going. She spends two days reading up on a very specific subject. Unbeknownst to her father she’s been studying a few subjects he would probably not be very happy to learn about. It’s a good thing he can’t know to ask and she, therefore, won’t tell.

Her visit to the bakery can’t come soon enough. Before long she’s sitting next to Eudora asking her questions for an exam she will be taking next week. The subject is science, something Vanya and the rest of her siblings are forced to excel at. Fortunately this means that Vanya can easily explain things to Eudora to help her conceptualize certain notions.

“You should become a teacher.”

“Really?” Asks Vanya “I feel like I’m barely making any sense.”

“No, no. You’re good at this. I won’t stand for this self slander.” Says Eudora laughing

“What would I even teach?”

“Ummm, violin?” Says Eudora like it’s the most obvious thing in the entire world.

“I haven’t practiced in months, who even knows if I can still play.”

“Come on, just because you haven’t played in a while doesn’t mean you’re immediately gonna forget every single thing there is to know about violin playing.”

“Alright, point. But even then you need to you know, have a violin to teach violin playing.”

“We could buy you one.”

“No!” Gasps Vanya “Don’t, they’re super expensive. I’d feel really guilty about it.”

“Not even for your birthday?”

“Trust me, a good violin is worth at least then birthday and Christmas gifts. Not that I’d know since I don’t actually get any of those.”

“When is your birthday again?”

“October first.”

“Wow... spooky.”

“Same as all my other siblings. We were all born on the same day at almost the exact same time.”

“Oh yeah. I forgot about that. Did your bastard of a father ever figure out how that happened?”

“I don’t think so. Even if he did he probably wouldn’t tell us. That’d be a very him thing to do.” Says Vanya before closing her eyes. She goes to rub the bridge of her nose with her index finger and her thumb as if doing so could somehow alleviate the headache she’s currently having.

“Everything alright?” Asks Eudora.

“Yeah, sorry. Just having a headache from withdrawal.”

“I thought you stopped taking those pills?”

“I did... but I had a panic attack two days ago and I couldn’t let Reginald know that I was off my meds.”

“Do you... want to talk about it?”

“Not right now. I’m still processing everything but I should be done processing soon. As soon as I finally wrap my head around the fact that my whole life has been a lie... again.”

“Sounds very serious.”

“It’s mild in comparison to a lot of other stuff honestly.”

“I’ll take your word for it. But just because there’s worse stuff doesn’t mean this less worse thing still can’t get to you just as much.” Eudora says. There’s a silence as Vanya thinks about her friend’s (her friend!) words.

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

“As always.”

Vanya snickers at that. They both know if they’re not careful they’ll become fluent in sarcasm and lose their ability to speak without a hint of irony.

“October first, that’s close. A week away!”

“Yeah.”

“You should come over, we’ll bake you a cake.”

“I won’t say no to that.”

“But you’ll say no to a brand new violin?”

“There’s a big difference between a cake and a violin.”

“... Fair point.”

“I might even bring Quentin.”

“Oh yeah. Cause you’ll finally be able to tell him about everything.”

“Exactly, including you guys.”

“I can’t wait to meet another Hargreeves.”

“Why?”

“To see if my theory that you’re somehow the most well adjusted one is right.”

“Why would you think that I’m the most well adjusted one? I literally come here almost every week to have a mental breakdown.”

“Yeah but that’s a semi healthy outlet or something. Like a therapist. The rest of your siblings are probably so repressed and emo.”

“I bet Quentin’s gonna have an emo phase.”

“Oh I need to see that!”

She does eventually go home, but the promise of a cake is enough to make her happy. Even though returning back to that place is never something she wants to do nowadays. Hopefully if everything goes according to plan she won’t have to spend all of her teenage years stuck in that place.

Hopefully.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry I haven’t updated in a while, college has been kicking my ass and I’ve been busy with life. I got a job! Disposable income is a very sexy thing to have when you want to buy yourself stuff. I also kinda got stuck on writing this chapter because I had no idea where I was gonna go with it. Hopefully now that that’s done I can advance the story more easily.
> 
> I had no idea what to put for the chapter summary so I just put that Vanya hates Mondays. Of course not as much as she hates Reginald but that’s another story.
> 
> As always if you enjoy leave a kudos or a comment and feel free to check out my tumblr @whooly-shep


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vanya and Five celebrate their birthday

The date is October first, also known by some as the beginning of the month of Halloween or also the date on which women around the world gave birth to children they didn’t have minutes before. Even for a few eccentric people, that day was the day of the second coming.

But for Vanya it’s none of those things. To her it’s her first birthday, at least her first real one. What a concept! To finally experience her birthday far away from Reginald and any of his mind games. To actually be normal and reap the benefits of the unwanted title.

But still, nobody in the family knows anything about her powers. They don’t suspect a thing. At least they don’t suspect that that is the reason she’s been acting odd. As if the idea of her having powers is too out there for any of them to even be able to contemplate the idea as a possiblity for even a moment.

They don’t know.

What they do know is that she’s been acting strange recently. Stranger than usual.

Recently, Vanya hasn’t been able stop herself from flinching every time Allison raises her voice. This would have been a minor issue a year ago when Vanya’s sister didn’t really care about her own sister. But now that her sister seems to actually care about her and her emotions, making these things pass under the radar would be harder.

Ben, always the dark horse, has surprisingly noticed the shift in Vanya’s behaviour too. Maybe she should have at least tried to go back to the library where she used to spend so much of her time reading silently in Ben’s presence. Maybe not. 

It’s not that it’s awkward or anything, it’s just that she can’t stand the silence anymore. Because to her, silence isn’t even really a thing she can experience anymore. At no one moment can she simply rest without hearing the couple down the street arguing as they always do. Without hearing her brother screaming down in the mausoleum, locked up for ‘training’.

Reading is quite hard when you can’t get your brother’s heartbeats out of your head. Surprisingly enough Ben technically speaking has multiple hearts. Or rather his creatures do at least.

Sometimes she can hear them squirm around.

It’s also hard to read when you’re trying very hard to scheme and not get caught while doing it. Reginald may have cameras strewn about the house but he still doesn’t know that Vanya knows. She’d like to keep it that way until she has the upper hand.

Klaus is another one of her siblings that didn’t register on her ‘hide your powers around’ radar until he started acting suspiciously.

She doesn’t know if it’s because Reginald has been sending him to the mausoleum more and more often or if it’s because of the drugs she suspects he’s started to take. Then again maybe it’s because she’s been interfering with his ‘training’ unbeknownst to Reginald. It’s nothing toooo big, she’s just been using her powers to make Klaus’s time in the mausoleum... better.

A week ago she’d been in her room crying loudly and she’d heard footsteps coming down the hallway. Footsteps she recognized by the way they hit a certain floorboard as Reginald’s. she knew if he heard her he’d know she had her emotions back. She tried and tried to stop crying but simply couldn’t.

So instead she tried using her powers in any way she could. It took her a minute but she finally figured it out. She’d make it so he couldn’t hear her.

Like a bubble she expanded the sound of nothing around her until she couldn’t hear anything except her own sobbing and heartbeat. No sound could get out nor get in.She couldn’t hear her ‘father’ coming down the hallway anymore but she was still able to see when he walked past her room, unable to hear her sobbing.

She stayed like that for a while, able to cry and scream as loudly as she wanted without fearing her father hearing her. It was... nice. To not only be as loud as she wanted but to not hear everything around her. She knew she couldn’t do this if anybody else were in the same room as her because otherwise they’d be able to tell something was off. But for now she could have some alone quiet time to herself.

She didn’t think much of her power until the next day when Klaus’s seat at the table was unmistakably empty. Her heart dropped at the sight because she knew what it meant

Before mom had even had the time to serve the cereal she could already hear his screams and pleas coming from the backyard. This was not good.

That’s when she had an idea. If she could make a bubble around her self that let no sound in or out then maybe she could do the same for Klaus. Maybe she could take away the screaming that he once told her haunted his dreams.

She couldn’t take away the fact that they were there but she could take away the worst of their presence.

So she spent the entire day maintaining a bubble around klaus. She wasn’t really tired because she’d been practicing her powers a lot lately but she still found it sometimes hard not to lose concentration and let the bubble pop.

Around dinner time is when Reginald decided to go to the mausoleum. As soon as he entered she let the bubble pop and listened to her brother’s heartbeat. Even from up in her room she could tell it was steady. Steadier than it ever had been while he was in the mausoleum.

She’d breathed out a sigh of relief.

Everything had been good that afternoon and she thought maybe things were improving. But then the next morning klaus started looking at her weirdly. She decided to not pay any mind to it, hoping that the whole thing would go away like it had for Luther and Diego.

Only it didn’t.

Now him and Ben were speaking to each other. Exactly like Diego and Luther had. If the two duos ever decided to speak to each other there was a possibility that they would start sharing information and guessing what made her upset. If Klaus opened his big mouth it would be over for her.

The stress of losing control of her secret looming over her, Vanya decided she would make Quentin leave with her to the bakery earlier than planned. Hopefully he wouldn’t think it too weird that she was now so good at sneaking out that she had to have done it on the regular while he was gone.

They both acted like they were going to sleep early and left the table at different times. She decided to leave and fake going to bed twenty minutes after Quentin had left so as to not attract any attention to their escapade.

When she finally met him outside down the street he seemed impatient to go.

“What took you so long?”

“I had to wait a bit before ‘going to bed’” Vanya says putting air quotes on the end of her sentence. “It’s not exactly inconspicuous to leave for bed at the same time. Actually it would probably attract too much attention.”

“That’s... actually a good point. Where did you learn to be so sneaky?”

“Well when you left I got bored and started sneaking out.”

“Yeah not shit. That doesn’t explain the whole James Bond vibe you’ve got going on.”

“Oh Quentin, you’ve barely seen me be sneaky, you’re in for a treat.” 

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Give it a year or two and then you’ll get it.”

“That’s not ominous at all.”

They continued to talk while walking. Vanya couldn’t help but notice that her brother seemed nervous and was constantly looking around. Maybe he though that Reginald would be at some street corner ready to jump out and take them both back to the house. Whatever it was she didn’t know and she didn’t know how to ask. 

So she just held his hand.

It seemed to work.

 

When they finally got to bakery Quentin seemed unimpressed, like he expected her to bring him to some ancient temple hidden under the city or something. If she knew of any she would have brought him there first but she doubted there were any of those in New York.

“Come on, they’re probably already waiting inside.”

“Who?”

“You’ll see.”

Once they got in Vanya realized that all the lights were dimmed. This was very unusual as most of the time the Patches left the lights on until one in the morning. She looked around feeling a bit crestfallen that her friend might have forgotten her big day. She looked to Quentin who looked back at her with a raised eyebrow.

Then suddenly the lights turned on.

“Happy birthday!” Shouted various people who came out of their hiding spots.

Quentin’s hand clenched around hers at the surprise. It’s only after he saw that Vanya wasn’t scared but happy that he unclenched it a little along with his jaw.

Mr Patch walked over to where the siblings were standing, a grin plastered across his face.

“So, how’s my favourite superhero doing?” The man said to Quentin’s utter confusion. He didn’t think the man had ever met him so why was he addressing him as his favourite superhero with such casualty?

“Not too bad.” Said Vanya

“Good, because we have a birthday party worthy of kings and queens planned for the two of you.”

“Umm, sorry but who is this?” Said Five looking uncomfortable.

“Oh! This is the Patch family. Wow! You all managed to make it.” Said Vanya who then proceeded to introduce Five to a slew of people he’d never met before. The only other time he’d ever met as many people was when he received a medal for saving a president from some European nation. Well that time and when he’d gone to the future. Did meeting the adult versions of your siblings count as meeting new people? 

“This is... a lot of people.”

“Come on, it’s just Eudora, her dad and mom, her two brothers and her grandparents.”

“That’s... still a lot of people.”

“Whatever you say Q.”

“So is this what you wanted to tell me about?”

“Well, in part. Basically I made friends with an entire family.”

“How did that happen?”

“It’s a long story, I’ll tell you after the cake?”

“Cake?”

“Yes, actual cake that isn’t disgusting.”

“Am I dreaming.” Quentin says, not really believing that the apparition in front of him isn’t some made up lie.

“No, now come on! The table’s already set up and everyone’s waiting for us.”

They head over to the table. Everybody is already sat down and talking with each other animatedly. He can’t help but think that this is what it should be like at home. Everybody happy and talking, not sitting in an oppressive silence waiting patiently for the meal to start and end as soon as possible.

They sit down and soon enough Mr Patch comes with with is probably the biggest cake he’s ever seen. Everybody is singing some birthday song that he doesn’t know because his father is a bastard and it’s too much.

Then one of the candles falls off the cake and into one of the adult’s drinks.

It catches on fire instantly.

Within a second everyone is reeling back from the fire and Mr Patch is calling for help.

“Vanya! Could give a hand!” Mr Patch says, again to Quentin’s utter confusion.

“Sure!” She says before lifting her hand. 

Then the glass starts moving! Without anybody even touching it. Nobody except Five looks surprised by whatever the hell is going on. Vanya’s hand is still lifted and the glass is moving in sinc with it. Then Vanya just let’s her hand drop and the glass, which is now above a sink, just drops.

Then everything goes back to normal.

Vanya turns to Five and says

“So about that.”

“You have superpowers.” Says Five breathlessly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, go check out my blog on tumblr @whooly-shep if you want and feel free to leave a kudos and a comment


End file.
